


Night Visitor I and II

by thebasement_archivist



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1998-07-31
Updated: 1998-07-31
Packaged: 2018-11-20 04:46:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11328900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebasement_archivist/pseuds/thebasement_archivist
Summary: Krycek wakes up in a strange bed.





	Night Visitor I and II

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Basement](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Basement), which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [The Basement's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thebasement/profile).

 

The Night Visitor by A. Leigh-Anne Childe

07 Jan 1998

The Night Visitor  
by A. Leigh-Anne Childe

NC-17.   
Skinner/Krycek slash.   
These fellows are the ostensibly the property of Chris Carter, a cruel heartless god who doesn't really deserve them. Archive as you like, without alteration. Spoilers for Terma. One small turn of phrase borrowed from Sheare Bliss, whom I hope won't mind. This is my holiday piece (of ass), such as it is. <beam> Enjoy. Goodwill toward manly men and the rest of you lovely lot, too.   
Feedback welcome: 

* * *

It was dark and depthlessly warm; he couldn't move, and didn't want to. For a moment the man's mind blended the current sensations surrounding him with the sense of hanging high above a cold dark forest, among whose trees hung the thick webbing of swarming insects, and then he was on the forest floor, having fallen hard to land on his arm. In the dream he was a phantom, but real pain lanced through him. He still could not move, but remained bound by paralysis, which seemed to hold him in invisible tiny threads, which stretched and tightened. . .tightened. . .

He woke and discovered himself bundled utterly in the quilted cocoon of bedcovers. It was a stunning and strange awakening. Sunlight lay across him in buttery squares, and the thin oatmeal- colored weave of the curtains made liquescent patterns across his body that shifted with the hot air wafting upward from the room's heating vent. It was so warm. He blinked, smiled sleepily to himself, though it was a faltering smile, rather cautious. Despite the previous night, he felt sure that at any moment he would be torn from his resting place, kicked out like a cat into the winter snow that had fallen in the night to drift and heap the suburban landscape outside the window. He could see, through a crack in the curtains, a huge drooping tree of snow. Tall tree--he was on the second floor, and yet its tangled branch-work filled his line of sight. 

Breakfasty sounds and smells were drifting up from below: bacon and butter, clinks and mutters--or, wait--perhaps that was a radio. He sat up awkwardly, swaddled in plaid flannel and the dark blue wealth of the bed's comforter, then slithered out of its wrap to stand upright on the carpeted floor. He had been uncannily quiet, but even so from the floor below he heard an answering pause. When the sound of movement resumed, he went to the bathroom, pissed, and then looked at himself in the mirror. His dark hair stuck up freakishly around his head and he scowled while fingering it back into a show of submission. This small act of grooming performed, he was left with the decision of whether or not to dress. But his clothes were nowhere to be seen, and borrowing from his host's closet without asking might earn him the kind of curt reprimand that would strain their fragile truce.

He went downstairs naked, wondering if his favorite jeans had been washed or burned, and strolled into the kitchen with only a moment's selfconsciousness, which had more to do with a sense of being a lopsided Venus de Milo than any worry about his bare genitals. But it was late to be worrying about that now. The man at the stove looked up, looked him over, and then looked expressionlessly back to his frying pan, in which he was stirring scrambled eggs. 

Alex Krycek smiled dryly. Skinner's aplomb was enviable; the man could take a stairwell gangbang like a pro--how much would a naked punk in his kitchen faze him? Answer: not damn much. 

"You didn't ask if I liked scrambled," he said, moving to lean over the stove, which was set into a countertop kitchen-island. He wondered idly if Skinner had installed it to reduce his likelihood of having his back to a door when cooking. That was how Alex's mind worked--tactically. The look Skinner gave him was not easily readable. His opaque, somehow flatly-set eyes traced their gaze over Alex again.

"You seem to have avoided infection," he said.

Alex absently touched the bandaged bullet graze on his cruelly abrupted left shoulder. *Wish they'd hit a bit lower,* he had remarked dryly to Skinner last night. What else good an artificial arm if not to take the odd, stray gunshot wound or two.

"I have an excellent constitution."

"Fortunate for you--since you seem to have no respect for anyone else's." It was an offhand dig, and Alex smirked. "Politics over breakfast, Walter? How gauche."

"Get dressed," Skinner said shortly. 

At the order, which came without elaboration, Alex looked around. He disliked being forced to ask questions, so chose instead the route of first-hand investigation, which led him to the small laundry room off the kitchen, where his clothes lay strewn, clean and hot, across the top of the dryer. He slid into his jeans, but merely held on to his sweater. A small window looked out over the yard and he pushed the curtain aside to stare out across the snow; a chill came off the window and his nipples tightened in response, and then a sudden spill of gooseflesh rushed across his exposed skin. Outside the sun glared over the fresh snow, riding its elaborate cursive up to buried fence-posts and drift-clad tree trunks. In the next yard children were building a snowman.

Alex returned to the kitchen. "You want me to leave in daylight?" he said in a casual voice, as he moved toward Skinner. The other man was ladling food onto two plates; when Alex rounded the edge of the counter, he moved--just slightly, but in a way that suggested a wariness of proximity. Alex halted, then moved closer. Their eyes flickered with glances that darted back and forth around each other's faces. Skinner put the back pan down on a burner with a tiny bang that shot a thrill along Alex's always wired nerves.

"Did I say I wanted you to leave?" Skinner said coldly, jerking his chin a little in a characteristically alpha-male way that made Alex want to smile, but now was not the time to tempt the other man's readiness to cuff him.

"My mistake," Alex said easily, tossing his sweater off to one side and sliding a footstep closer. 

"What do you think you're doing?" Skinner asked with dispassionate interest. "Nothing." Alex ducked his head and fastened his lips at the pulse-point of Skinner's throat. The other man, unmoving, sighed and said nothing, but the pulse under Alex's lips jerked hard. Alex, nuzzling, could feel his hair brushing underneath the other man's unshaven chin. Intimacy? Not exactly. But he took what he could get, when those rare chances came. 

"I don't like cold eggs," Skinner said, pushing him away finally after a long minute, looking not at all distracted by Alex's maneuvers.

They ate in silence, Alex not wishing to annoy Skinner and thus choosing the safest course, Skinner wordless by nature. It was not a brooding breakfast, though, just a quiet one, and after the details of clearing and cleaning, it was not too surprising when Alex felt hard hands grab him and twist him around for kissing. They both tasted of strong coffee; their mouths were still hot from it. It grew more difficult to tell from which source Alex's tongue burned--scorching drink or kiss. He felt warm, replete with sleep and food, sated but ready to give pleasure if it was demanded. It was demanded. No problem. He remained grateful for Skinner's reprieve, temporary though it might be. Last night, he'd only meant to break in, to take what he could find in the way of cash, portables, and first aid, and leave before his ex-boss and long-ago lover returned. A stupid move, perhaps, but it had been stupider getting caught, enough so that he wondered if he'd wanted to--and Alex Krycek was not a man normally given to such incisive self-analysis.

Danger--wasn't that was nine-tenths the kick? His body said yes. Walter Skinner wasn't his usual type. Alex preferred a prettier and more sexually ambiguous sort of animal. A Fox, actually. But muscle and machismo had its occasional brute appeal, even when combined with a testy bureaucratic temperament and a soul of chipped ice. 'Lovers' was a strong, sweet word for what they had actually been, for their numbered handful of secret ruttings, accidental, banal, impersonal. But what they'd had had been enough to forge a bond--a thin, strained one, to be sure, but for now it was holding.

"You're not getting enough, Walter," Alex murmured against the other man's mouth. Skinner's trouser-clad cock was jutting so stiffly against Alex's belly he might have been the original inspiration for the pistol-in-the-pocket joke. 

Skinner's mouth removed itself and his thumb dug cruelly into the soft flesh beneath Alex's chin. "Don't call me Walter."

Alex half-laughed. "Christ, you sound just like--"

"Don't say it."

His order was equivocal, but his meaning clear. Surprised into annoyance, Alex said, "Why the hell not?"

With a voice bruising in its coolness, Skinner replied, "If I think about what I'm doing, you'll regret it."

"You mean if I invoke Mulder's name--Mulder, Mulder--you'll have a crisis of conscience--hey--" Alex jerked out a gasp as Skinner slammed him into the counter and slapped him hard. He was already regretting his reckless, unthinking taunts, but not sure how to appease the other man. Besides the obvious.

Danger. Nine-tenths the charge.

"Fuck--cut it out," he said as Skinner's hand moved to impact again, this time in a backslap. He could not quite pull his face from the blow's path. Rough knuckles seemed to drag directly across his cheekbone as if cutting the intervening flesh free, then the right side of his face exploded in pain. Familiar pain, but still distressing. He tasted blood.

"Go for it, killer," Alex rasped out when Skinner's hand rose again. 

Skinner stopped. His face was darkly lit, taut but writhing with suppressed anger. Alex could read the struggle taking place within. Would the lust be subsumed into the violence, or the violence into lust? Alex, hoping to help the other man make his decision, deliberately stretched his right arm out along the counter and presented his body as an offering. A punch in the gut might have been forthcoming; it was a chance he took. But Skinner grabbed him and shoved him into movement, pushing him out of the kitchen, then up the stairs. There were a few times when Alex was tempted to kick out and send the other man bouncing down the carpeted steps, but he held the dark fire of his soul in check.

Last night had been quick, rough--need meeting need--Skinner astride him on the enveloping softness of the bed, Alex falling nearly asleep even as he was impaled and ridden thoroughly into an orgasm that had drained away his last reserves of energy and sent him sinking at last into blissful darkness. Now, Alex suspected Skinner would exact a fuller measure of payment for debts incurred. 

"Why didn't you get a Christmas tree," he asked idly, glancing down off the landing as they moved toward Skinner's room. 

"Cut the small talk," Skinner said tonelessly, close on Alex's heels.

"Christ, you're a hard ass--hey, okay--don't *push* me." The injunction was literal--Skinner's large hand had just impacted in the small of his back--but the words, bitten off with terse anger, also carried another level of warning.

In the bedroom they squared off. "You came to me," Skinner said coolly. "Don't get uppity."

Alex stared at the other man a moment, his jaw twitching askew and lips parting slightly as mild laughter caught in his throat. "Yeah, okay."

It had been a concession, but Skinner's eyes narrowed at something, the grudge perhaps, in Alex's tone of voice. "You're wanted on assault charges, and for questioning in relation to possible charges of conspiracy and kidnapping, not to mention a host of other likely infractions of the federal code and local laws. And if I don't include murder on your roster of harm, it's only for lack of evidence, not plausibility. You want me to pick up that phone?" A small movement of Skinner's head indicated the machine on the bedside table. 

"What do you think?" Alex said coldly.

"Hard on a one-armed man in prison, I'd think. Hard to keep your balance when the boys on the cell-block have you bent over a toilet and are taking turns using you for one."

"What a prize fucker you are." Alex shook his head, still more amused--even admiring--than perturbed. His eyes glinted and gleamed. "Does Mulder have any idea what species of shark lurks under that button-down facade of yours?"

"Don't push me," Skinner said in a toneless replay of Alex's earlier words. 

"You've got a hard-on for him, always have." Alex's chin nudged upward in a tiny jerk of defiant emphasis. "Saint Mulder the Credulous. You can admit it to *me*, sir." The 'sir' was mocking, the observation a jibe whose point was dipped in acid. But Skinner wasn't playing.

Instead he said unexpectedly, "That extra punch of yours-- that time you and your associates jumped me. I've been waiting a while to thank you for that."

"Well, you know. . .I was missing you." Alex's lips thinned and his eyes flattened. His voice pushed so hard to make a lie of the statement that the words were inverted back into what might have been nearly truth.

Walter Skinner stared at the cheeky dark-souled phantom who stood before him. Clear-eyed, he had no illusions about Alex Krycek, didn't shroud him in mists of inappropriate glamour. He had no glamour, no authority, no sway on Skinner, and he was ethically irremediable. And yet he was far more than a machine made flesh, an amoral automaton set into action by a higher power. What creed or need motivated Krycek, Skinner didn't know, but despite his apparent rootlessness and violent bent, he was no sociopath. Nor was he a fool; Skinner would bet on it. Had.

After Krycek's disappearance, implicating him in evens that were very likely government-sponsored illegalities, Skinner had adjusted into a hard period of anticipation. He had waited for the letter, the envelope and inevitable videocassette--had waited, gut coiling, for the remark that would one day be dropped oh so casually by the man who had first been introduced to Skinner with the disingenuous appellation "Mr Morley". And it never came. Instead, much later--after Krycek's brief but brutal reappearance in his life--he had received during a solitary restaurant lunch one day a handwritten note, delivered by his waiter. Brief, neat, it had read: "I pulled that punch. You've been expecting to hear from me. This is it. I never recorded anything. I never told. We cheated the bastards of that. Thought you'd like to know."

The relief, the ambivalence, still twined in Skinner's gut with less equivocal and disturbing feelings--simple anger, among others. But he himself had been pushed down a path that was perhaps not very different from the one Krycek traveled now. He could have been--well, if not another Krycek, then an equally damaged and tainted product. Public disgrace, perhaps a suicide that no amount of planning could render dignified--these could have been his reward for recklessness, for playing fast and loose in a muddy field he'd had no business entering. 

Now here was Krycek, standing in front of him, bearing the ugly evidence of reaped justice, however informal and extreme. Irregular in probity, he was now irregular in the flesh, and looked like the botched remnant of a methodical dissection, the kind of thorough dismantling and disappearing that puppet-masters liked to inflict when their toys had outlived usefulness. He knew the real reason for Krycek's crudely broken body, but it still jarred Skinner's resolve not to re-entrench himself in matters sinister. Krycek was firmly on the left side of the fence, but even so Skinner had harbored him and fed him eggs and buried his cock up that fine ass, unable to resist exacting his own measure of private recompense. 

And he wanted more. Needed more. One pounding of flesh was proving. . .not enough.

*He's right*, Skinner thought abruptly. *I need to get laid more often.*

"So--what? We on for it? You want me on my knees?" Krycek shrugged a bit with impatience. "On my *hand* and knees," he added with dark sarcasm, rather as an afterthought.

"We can try that," Skinner said. He crossed his arms and drew off his navy-blue tee shirt with one fluid move, then tossed it on the dresser. He stripped off jeans as well, then considered Krycek. It had been disturbing to watch him work into his sweater in the kitchen--a loose woolen item designed like a jacket, zippered for convenience, it suggested a uniform that necessity had made too familiar, and even so Skinner had had to resist the instinctive urge to help Krycek dress. 

Undressing him, however, would be expedient. He moved toward Krycek, who flinched back a hair then stilled watchfully. But when Skinner's hand lifted to the sweater's zipper, Krycek said in an arctic voice, "I can do that."

"Beside the point. Shut up." Skinner unzipped him, shoved the garment off excruciatingly asymmetrical shoulders--one ongoing, one abridged--and stared at Krycek's body in the light of day. A few scars, but no scales, no bolts or hinges on the other man's emphatically human flesh. The ordinariness of torso warred with the severed arm, the absence that remained like the stubborn presence of what should have been. 

"You're frowning," Krycek said quietly, almost breathing the words somewhere in the vicinity of Skinner's jaw. Though jaded, his voice always seemed on the verge of expressing interest; this tension of opposites always unresolved.

"Mm," Skinner grunted abstractedly. He handled the nape of Krycek's neck, ran his thumb up a line of tendon behind one ear. Dark hair, too soft for such a hard man, filled Skinner's hand as he lifted it to the curve of skull in which this creature resided, his life's fire coiled like a nest of restless snakes within. What were his thoughts like? Like generations of vipers, short-lived but breeding and replicating themselves in the way of cells and habits? Knotted, unknowable, a serpentine entwinement of drives and dreams. It was perhaps too susceptible of him to wonder, too close to caring- -Skinner knew this, and yet curiosity itched at him. It was as if he possessed a psychic nose that sniffed the scent of disappointed need, of the bitter ash left behind after a thorough betrayal. Whatever the powers that be had done to their tool, Alex Krycek, Skinner suspected it could have been avoided, if only. And this was the rotten heart of the truth.

He caught Krycek's--Alex's--gaze and their eyes locked in grave mutual contemplation, the kind of look men give each other who are unsure how far to trust. But trust wasn't an issue here. There couldn't possibly be any trust left between them. Too much had happened. But the younger man's face was close and fascinating, dark and sharp and strangely formed, both fiendish and angelic, if by angels one imagined something fallen and conflicted, impure and fierce. One of the sword-wielding angels, with a score to settle and an excess of zeal. Not unlike Mulder, if one followed through on the likeness, and perhaps that had been part of the appeal.

Skinner kissed his fugitive, and immediately half regretted the impulse and its fulfillment. His earlier kisses had been less deliberate, more furious. Just another kind of feeding. This was too much, too much intimacy. And yet if he gave into his opposing desires he would do no better, would likely do more harm. Brutality was easy, but the pleasure was too fast and facile, and the aftermath would yield no satisfaction. 

Krycek's mouth tasted of mingled, not unpleasant flavors, and offered to Skinner the uniqueness of itself, of a distinctive shape and method recollected by this kiss. He kissed as if he wanted to be fucking with his tongue. Impersonal in so much else, he was rawly present in his kisses, which was why Skinner had rarely allowed the indulgence during their handful of hotel-room liaisons. 

A limber-fingered hand came up behind Skinner's own neck, to rest on the curve of bone and muscle where his remaining hair lay close to the skin in a short, rough pelt. Skinner sighed into Krycek's mouth. Regret. Dark regrets. 

"It's been a while for you too, hasn't it," he said without forethought, intuitive enough to decode the text of Krycek's tensed body, the meaning of its fresh, sharp arousal.

"A while," Krycek said in his naturally husked, brooding tenor, that incongruous bedroom voice which had been of the hooks to catch Skinner's original interest. "I'm not the lay I used to be," he said, self-mockingly. Voice still low, dark and stretched as leather or velvet; metaphors more suitable to the wet soft fabric of his tongue, which could be like the lapping of suede across Skinner's body. 

Skinner's flesh prickled with renascent interest. "You'll do," he said briefly. In answer, Krycek just breathed out a tiny ironic snort, while Skinner freed the mental tethers on his hands and let them roam across the younger man's body. Why not do as he pleased; there was no one watching, no reckoning. He had long ago accepted the indifference of an abstract god, and Justice wore a blindfold, didn't she. Good thing; if not, she might see more than she bargained for.

He touched the sharp blades of collarbones, traced the line of hair bisecting the chest, thumbed nipples as small and perfect as new pennies. Krycek had the lean and hungry look of a skulking alley cat, but it suited him. Now he was descending into that perpetual erotic breathlessness that Skinner remembered so well. From this point on, if true to form, he would play a symphony of small, grudging gasps, until orgasm approached, when he would curse and then scream, fighting surrender every step of the way. Last night he'd been too tired to vocalize. A pity, but today should make up for that.

"Get on the bed," Skinner said quietly, pulling away and moving off to ensure the readiness of accessories. The lube was old, the stock of condoms generic, but both were usable. When he looked up from his night-table, Krycek had shucked back out of his jeans and climbed onto the rumpled bed. It was impossible not to reassess him with every gaze: the shock of seeing his mutilated body had a surprising resiliency, still stunned and distracted Skinner, catching him off guard each time he reviewed the absence from a different angle.

Krycek noticed Skinner's examination. "You ever hear some guys getting turned on by amputees? Think they have clubs for that? Big and beautiful, they got--how about, I dunno, 'Chopped and Charming'? How's that sound."

"Ugly."

"Well, no fucking kidding." 

"Are you fishing for compliments?" Skinner asked, incredulity striking him. 

Krycek, who had turned to stare out the window, good arm wrapped around his folded knees, looked up at him askance. Derision colored his words. "Oh please. Give me a break."

Had there actually been a tiny crack in that brittle voice? Skinner didn't trust his own judgment; Krycek was a hell of an actor--and he was always working some angle. 

"I've seen worse," Skinner said. The words were blunt, laconic, but Krycek nodded once in acknowledgment.

"Part of the trade, or so I've been told." Krycek picked lightly at a scab on his knee, face wiped clean of expression. "They just don't tell you all that you'll have to trade. . .for the trade." 

"I can't feel sorry for you."

"Who asked you to." Still erased of facial expression, Krycek stretched back out on the bed. "Come fuck me. I could use a good fuck. Last night didn't count. I was out of it."

"You're in no position to make demands," Skinner said, but he sat down on the bed. The words were empty, not even the ghosts of old teasing. They had never teased each other during their times together, rarely spoken, even. They had hooked up, fucked, and then gone their separate ways, a minimalist masculine ritual.

Krycek's head turned on the heap of pillows. He looked decadent, darkly impish, a Beardsley catamite scrawled across the sheets. Skinner lay down next to him and fingered the plane of Krycek's unshaven jaw. "I can't kiss you any more like this," he said, half to himself. "Someone might wonder about the rash."

"I'd love to see you explain *that* to Kimberly," Krycek snickered.

Her name on this outlaw's lips gave Skinner a jolt and he frowned. "I'm thinking seriously of gagging you. So you might want to shut up."

"I might, I might not. You ever contemplated the benefits of a one-handed man in handcuffs? Easy to turn." Krycek's smile was dangerous, feral.

"Oh, I'm contemplating that." Eschewing further talk, Skinner bent and turned his attention to the younger man's outstretched body. He contemplated--through action--the benefits of fucking a man who expected little or no consideration: every gift was a favor and a surprise. Krycek seemed intrigued, amused, that Skinner wanted to lick his nipples, tongue his belly, embroider his flesh with the roses and bruises of pleasure. Amused, and then encouraging. 

"Fuck, *yes*," he groaned, when Skinner sucked in the lifting length of his cock. Alex cupped Skinner's face and felt the amazing evidence of what was occurring--incredible, the feel of the other man's mouth stretched around his swelling flesh, lips welding to his flushed skin and leaving it damp but burning with aggressive suction. One hand only to grip and guide his tormentor, but it was nearly enough. Lips slid up his shaft, and then the furnace of Skinner's mouth became a focused enclosure on his cockhead, which leaked and pearled with the juices rising within. 

Alex's hips trembled, already straining to shove. Who could have guessed that Walter Skinner would condescend to blow him? In their half dozen times together, he'd only lowered himself to the job--literally and figuratively--no more than twice. After so much passed time and dirty water under the bridge, it was extraordinary that he'd accepted Alex's visit at all, let alone joined him for an old-times-sake buddy fuck. 

*Thank you, Jesus*, thought Alex dizzily. It felt so damn good, rich water upwelling inside him after a shriveling, soul-scorching drought, when he had felt so bone-dry of feeling and humanity that only stubbornness had stayed his gun hand from the final act of self-obliteration. So fucking sweet to have a man go down on you, to *want* to.

"Ah, Christ--don't--yes, don't--"

"Don't stop?" Skinner asked goadingly, after removing his mouth.

"Oh, shit." Alex groaned. Skinner's hand moved deftly on his shaft, fingering the thick vein along the underside, tapping his pulse and working the taut, blushing skin around in small circles that traveled up and then down into his balls, where they became a concentrated storm of slow, rotative pressure, stroking around and around, building an inexorable ache.

"Who've you been practicing on?" he grated out, desperate need making his voice harsh and thick, though laughter jagged beneath the surface.

"Myself."

"Good work."

Skinner responded by sliding his hand lower; Alex could feel those strong, blunt fingers seeking the entrance to his body, and then felt their prodding measure slide home, into the ringed heat of him, where he was still slippery and stretched from the previous night. He lifted his legs to accommodate the readying. Hard fingers burrowed deeper, found his prostate--another surprise--and began rubbing a kindling fire there.

"All this foreplay--you'll spoil me," Alex said, his tone falling somewhere between sarcasm and breathless gratitude.

*Too late*, Skinner might have said, but something held his tongue even from this most minor of jeers. "You could probably use some spoiling," he said instead, much to his bewildered dismay. To cover for his lapse into a tolerance too generous for his own comfort, he jabbed his fingers deep and simultaneously drew himself up between Krycek's legs.

Kneeling there, he withdrew his hand and reached for lube and condom. Krycek lay staring at him, his one arm raised now to loosely parenthesize his head. Lips parted, eyes heavily lidded with lust, he was still capable of projecting an interiorized brooding. He might have been plotting, might merely have been composing a mental shopping list, but he looked like a devil meditating on his next work of mischief.

After rolling on the condom, Skinner rubbed a thick smear of lube inside the younger man's body. The dryer, the tighter--it would have been a ball-swelling rush to ram home and watch the younger man's face battle the admission of pain--Skinner suspected that Krycek's Achilles' heel was a pride in his own endurance. But he hadn't felt the hots to make a sparring partner cry 'Uncle' since he was a rude adolescent. Regression was to be avoided.

Yet if Skinner wasn't cruel, he wasn't particularly considerate either. He entered with a driving, powerful thrust whose impetus wanted to split the other man's tight ass apart, and the full length of his cock filled that hot channel with a throbbing demand not to be resisted. Krycek arched against the splitting force, pushing into it with perverse greed. His ass gripped Skinner's cock and milked it: short, stabbing muscular contractions that were like to make short work of them both. Skinner wrestled the other man's hips and rammed deeper, abandoning caution entirely. Krycek's good hand stripped his own shaft with a frantic rhythm that Skinner matched until he felt the first orgasmic spasms begin, clamping down on his swollen organ. At that point, his own hips lost their tempo and his movements devolved into primitive, irregular thrusts, arrows shot wildly through his cock to spill their flaming burden out the far screaming mouth of him. That small exploding point seemed a wound jetting blood if not seed: it was that keen, that sharply bladed. 

And when it was over, it left Skinner cut to ribbons. He drew out of Krycek's body with selfish carefulness, disposed of the mess clinging to his aching cock, then dropped heavily back onto the bed, from which position he stared at the ceiling and considered the implications of his act and the undiscovered future of his compromised life.

A mess of complicated shadows, a house of smoke and mirrors--this was what his world had become. 

Neither of them said anything for a long time. Krycek, by all appearances, slept. He himself could not sleep, but lay instead on one side, gaze cradling the other man with what should have been an impersonal form of witness. When Krycek finally woke it was like a cat, with simply opened eyes that were immediate clear and watchfully conscious. They stared at each other.

"So where are you going from here?" Skinner asked almost flatly, but with a slight, accusatory emphasis on the 'are' that he hadn't meant to allow.

"I don't know. I don't make many long-term plans these days." The words were implicitly evasive, but then again, what else would they be.

"It amazes me that you had no one else in D.C. to turn to," Skinner said, a subdued taunting.

"Says a lot, doesn't it."

"You have an agenda. You always have." Skinner knew he was probing further than he should. There were things he should not know, questions he should not risk the answers to.

"I'm a bit short on options. . .these days."

Something passed unspoken between their mutually watchful faces that resulted in a mildly incredulous look appearing on Krycek's face. 

"You have one for offer?"

"How could I," Skinner returned curtly, but he felt a frisson of urgency in his flesh that was not so much sexual as fearful. He was precariously closer to the edge of rashness than he could have believed possible. Events of the past day had been the catalyst for long buried energies to rise to the burning surface. He wanted things, many of them not very nice, and not appropriate for a man in his position. And yet he wanted them fiercely, with an unexpected lust. Pleasures, secrets--power. His *own* power, not the poisoned residual gifts of someone else's venomous fangs. Power acquired like that was dangerous; those fangs could not be loosened from the soul once they'd bitten deep.

Krycek was studying him, his dark eyes radiantly detached like those of a jungle cat, but curious. "You'd like to stay on the side of the angels," he said, voice smooth, rolling out his observation. "But you and me, we're not getting our wings. In case you were still wondering."

"Speak for yourself."

"Why do you even try to keep your hands clean anymore-- because you think you work for Justice, or because you think that one day you'll get your dick in *his* ass and won't be able to keep it up unless you're pure."

"Don't go there." Skinner spoke without rancor, and his calm seemed to halt Krycek's desire to bait.

"You know where I've come from--you know who I worked for. The fucking U.S. government." Krycek's voice remained equally calm and steady, unraised. "Legality, morality, justice--sing it all you want, but there are always going to be men who have to decide what has to be done, what the people need to know and what they can't handle."

"Don't try and sell me on the cause, Krycek. I'm not buying and I'm not playing."

"Yet."

"There's always a yet," Skinner said, not in concession but in familiar resignation that carried a whiff of bitterness. He paused, caught up in a moody gyre of conflicted thoughts, then raised his restless, ambivalently shadowed eyes again to consider Krycek. "I want to know where you're going."

"Why."

"To know whether or not I should let you go."

Alex, rendered momentarily slack-jawed, stared at Skinner, then shook himself scoffingly free of the brief, gripping sense of-- of what? Some feeling he hadn't had in half a lifetime, but which was delusional. Skinner had certainly not meant to imply concern; he'd meant the obvious, that he was contemplating turning Alex in to the authorities and needed some reason not to, however strained and mendacious. And Alex, always ready with a breezy lie, felt speech dry up on his tongue.

Finally, after a long minute, he said, "I can't tell you where I'm going because I don't know. The only contacts I have right now are people I don't want to contact. Someone I was supposed to meet in Maryland never showed up, but some ugly fuckers did. I think there's a contract out on me--besides the 'official' one, I mean. You know, don't you, that I'd never stand trial? I wouldn't last a week in any prison."

He was so dryly matter of fact that Skinner's gut clenched with anger against the machinery of power that could enact such events with casual rote. It wasn't sentimentality that made him angry on Krycek's behalf, but he felt again that knotty, twisting regret for a man who had been used and mangled by the system, and though it were playing right into Krycek's own best interests, he'd be damned if he gave the man over to certain death at the long-reaching hands of their shared shadow government.

"I know," he said, giving Krycek's rhetorical question his own phatic reply. "I'm not turning you in. I wouldn't have fucked you if I were."

"Yeah, that would be a tricky one." Krycek's lips turned up in fleeting impishness. 

"Do you have money?"

"If I did--"

"You wouldn't be here," Skinner finished for him, grimacing.

"Mm. I don't have a stash anywhere here in the States. My resources have dried up. I entered the country with one knapsack and now even that's gone."

"Why don't you call up Mother Russia and see if she'll fly you home."

"Yeah, well, that's the problem. I don't think my foster mom's feeling too friendly right now."

"Tell me you're not really a traitor. I'll feel so much better about this." Skinner's double-bladed sarcasm escaped him without warning, and after the brief lull that followed they both shared an equally abrupt release of humor--small winces and snorts that didn't quite pass for laughter but which defused the sparking tension.

"We could swap philosophies on nationalism versus globalism, but I don't particularly want to go there right now, do you?"

"Later," Skinner said.

It took a moment for the implications of that single word to sink into Alex's pooling thoughts. He blinked. "How much later?" he asked despite himself, hoping there was not the slightest hint of wist in his voice, suspecting there was. "Like, later later, or. . .later."

"I think it would be a good idea to keep you around. No one would expect you to be here in the D.C. area."

"What, in Walter Skinner's new Alexandria colonial? Yeah, that would spin their compasses all to hell." Alex snorted again.

"You can't stay here," Skinner said bluntly. "But the city is full of discreet apartments for those. . .close encounters."

"You can't crack a joke," Alex said ruefully. 

"I wasn't trying," Skinner lied.

"You really want a rentboy? I'm touched. Impressed. Walter Skinner cultivates his image as suave government exec--what's your next status symbol--cottage on the Eastern shore, yacht for hosting those get-friendly DEA parties--"

"Don't make me reconsider my offer."

"Do it now if you're going to. You think I'm going to change my stripes once I'm shackled to a waterbed for your weekend pleasure?"

"Jesus, you're an asshole."

"No shit, *Walter*."

They glared at each other, but more mildly than their words warranted. Neither was up to more than a negotiational skirmish, and that fact was clearer to them both with every passing instant.

"I'm going to be bored as shit," Alex groused.

"You'll get over it."

"You're gonna be followed sooner or later."

Skinner rolled over onto his back, unkinking cramped muscles. "Let me worry about that." He felt rather than saw Alex sidelong gleaming darkly at him.

"I don't think so, stud. It's my throat up for cutting."

"Then just let me worry about it for now--and I'll update you when I think of what the hell I'm going to do about it--all right?" His tone was flat, subliminally impatient.

Alex sat up, ran a hand through his tousled hair. From this position he locked gazes with Skinner again. "Did I ever tell you I don't go for butch daddies?" he asked with bland, conversational snarkiness.

"You're not my type either."

"As long as that's settled. . .what's for lunch?"

"It's Christmas, what do you think?" Skinner watched with bemused intrigue as Alex's jade-green eyes nearly betrayed their owner by lighting him up from the inside. 

"Turkey? Ham--duck?" 

"Duck? Christ, where did you grow up."

"That's classified." Alex smirked.

"There's a turkey in the oven."

"God, I thought I was imagining that smell." He cocked his head at Skinner, lips parting slightly. "You always cook a turkey for one?"

Skinner stood and pulled on his jeans, then moved to the bedroom door, where he stood with his shirt in his hand and his eyebrows moderately raised. "Depends. Sometimes guests drop in unexpectedly over the holidays." 

He left the room, and Alex heard his muted descent on the carpeted stairs. He sat on the dishevelled bed, on his pleasantly sore ass, and attuned himself to the awkward disbalance of his body, and watched the play of curtained light turn small windings of fire in the dresser mirror. Funny, how life clung to the body and would not be shaken off. Merry Christmas. He might not need that gun yet after all. 

***

Finis, Happy Holidays. :)

 

* * *

 

07 Jan 1998  
Acquainted with the Night  
by A. Leigh-Anne Childe  
Skinner/Krycek slash. NC-17. Part of a trifling series on a weirdly insistent theme. My playthings are borrowed. Archive as you like it. Feedback welcome; .

* * *

***  
And further still at an unearthly height,  
One luminary clock against the sky  
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.  
I have been one acquainted with the night.  
  --Robert Frost  
***

Slumped into the crook of the couch and semi-absorbed in watching television, Alex still glanced up with the immediacy of old instinct when he heard footsteps near the apartment door. When the door began to open, his hand moved to the space between couch arm and cushion, where he had secreted a street-bought 9 mm, but then his dipped hand rose again--it was just Walter Skinner, carrying an overnight bag and a large briefcase. 

Alex's gaze latched to the luggage then lifted to consider the other man. "What's up?" he asked indifferently, turning back to the TV but remaining attuned to Skinner's movements. His peripheral vision tingled with hyperactive awareness.

"What's it look like," Skinner said, voice bland, as he hung his coat up. He made an absent grunting noise, perhaps of disgust, as he brushed snow off the coat and shook it off his bags. From the couch, Alex could not quite see Skinner run a hand over his uncovered head, but he could imagine that familiar action too easily. 

Alex would have preferred to ignore Skinner's rejoinder--the implications were obvious enough--but after a fidgeting minute of listening to Skinner enter the bedroom and then return to futz around the living area, he found it impossible to hold his tongue. "Looks like you're going to make a night of it," he said flatly, reaching for his beer, still not looking at the other man, who moved somewhere behind him, unseen but palpably present. 

"I'm having some rooms painted this weekend," Skinner said. 

Alex blinked thoughtfully at the television screen. "You desk jockeys--that cushy lifestyle really takes its toll on you, doesn't it. Can't even pick up a paint-roller. . .I'm surprised you're not worried about plants."

"That's why I'm doing it," Skinner said, and Alex heard the dry edge of satisfaction. The voice behind him continued speaking in a low register, almost to itself. "I've got the house monitored, and I've got someone lined up to do a sweep afterwards. Thought I'd give them the opportunity, see what comes of it. Find out how closely they're watching these days."

"Not a bad plan," Alex admitted, turning on the couch to rest his chin on the back and stare at Skinner. Mildly surprised at the other man's initiative, he dug his chinbone against the couch and considered him. He looked, as always, very much the ex-Marine, neat, trim, and exhibiting in the controlled trajectories of his movements a subdued, brooding vigor. A full charge of energy coiled in those abundant muscles; the advancing years hadn't advanced all that far. Tonight instead of his usual suit he was wearing a denim shirt and jeans, and looked too butch for words. 

Alex raised his hand to the couchback and rubbed his chin against it. He felt more expressionless than usual, as if gravity pulled more strongly at the muscles of his face, tugging its masked surface flat. He was already half hard; it bugged him. How dare his body betray anticipation, hunger, need--Alex was inclined to brutalize his rebellious flesh into submission, but hopping on the exercise bike seemed too blatant a provocation. Meanwhile, showing no sign he was aware of Alex's look, Skinner was opening his briefcase on the dinner table, setting up his laptop and stacking files. During his actions, his face, downturned in studious habit, reflected an absorption that suggested his thoughts were elsewhere, as if their arrival lagged behind his body, and yet it was a safe bet he was fully conscious of his solitary audience.

"I'm surprised you trust me not to pry," Alex said, staring at the array of business materials on the table. 

"When I'm done with this it all locks back up--and then I'm going to keep you busy." 

"Great," Alex said, but in contrast to his toneless voice his cock evidenced a more honest show of interest, stiffening a little further at the words. Luckily the couch hid this vital enthusiasm. Faintly disgusted with himself, Alex turned back to watching TV. He spent the next hour or so in a blank display of involvement with competitive gymnastics, his mind turning on a wheel which carried him through a continuous flow of restless thoughts: could he find someone to teach a one-armed, thirtysomething man how to backflip, should he get up and have another beer, what innovative demands would Skinner make on his body tonight, were there subliminal messages in that fast-food commercial, a backflip after all didn't involve arms, yes he definitely wanted another beer. 

Alex got up and went to the kitchen, grabbed a beer, then, after a moment's thought, another. He popped the caps on the lower edge of a cabinet, whose abraded wood already showed signs of regular service, then returned to the other room. He came up behind Skinner and let his hand slide down over the other man's shoulder, then made a small gesture of competency by rolling one gripped bottle to the forefront, in an offering. Alex's eyes flicked across the computer screen automatically while Skinner took the beer.

"It's nothing that would interest you."

"You're welcome," Alex said irritably.

"You're predictable." 

Indeed, Skinner sounded unbothered, unsurprised. Alex glared at the back of his head, tempted to stick out his tongue, but merely made a face instead, before taking a pull on his beer.

Skinner turned in his chair to stare up at Alex. His eyes performed a casual, habitual survey, as if he were assessing Alex's fashion choices or seeking evidence of a lapse in his exercise regimen--or perhaps just inspecting the well-marked districts of his territory. Alex was momentarily aware of the contrast between Skinner's expensive tidiness and his own more careless dress--recognized the difference and dismissed it. Irrelevant. He'd been wearing the same sweatpants and cut-off sweatjacket all day, even while working out. Clothes were a hassle these days. 

When Skinner stood, Alex had to forcibly command himself not to take a step back; his body twitched, live wire, then stilled. The forceful greeting of Skinner's mouth was not unexpected, but the force of his own body's response was. He wanted to chuck aside the beer, hated having one hand in such circumstances, wanted to feel something, anything, with what touch he had left. Skinner, unconstrained for his part, cupped Alex's ass with one hand, and his head with the other, fingers digging into his hair. Alex's face pulled into the resemblance of a snarl as he deepened the kiss despite himself. But they were both driven to this; their tongues skipped and jabbed like rapiers, sliding back and forth together, blades that mimicked intimacy as they dueled. Breath quickening, harshening, Alex accepted what would devour him, the strokes of fire spilling across the aching vaulted premises of his mouth, invasive and excruciating. 

He was harder than he'd realized; the pull of Skinner's body made him aware of himself, where his cock pressed rigidly into the other man taut belly. God, how long a week could be; the waiting that he refused to call by its name; the savagery of relief when it arrived. Mouth to mouth, he had to acknowledge that the connection was lifesaving, or near enough that it made no difference. 

"How much longer you gonna work?" he said after detaching his mouth to let his breath catch up. He could feel a broad hand still cupping and working his ass; his lust was humiliating and exhilarating. Feelings were not just mixed but melted together, inseparable in their cauldron.

"I'm done. Or I can be. But I want dinner."

"Ah, shit ," Alex said, grimacing. He met the other man's gaze, letting the look rise from beneath his lashes, tilting his head a little so that his rakishly unmannered hair caught at his eyes, knifing across their green smolder.

Skinner's hand rested proprietorially against the back of Alex's neck, and his thumb moved up under one ear, rubbing with a slow rhythm that suggested an unconscious sensual attention. His face showed no involvement, though; it might have been hacked from a slab of volcanic pumice, stiff and unsmooth though he worked to keep it smoothed flat of expression. "I was thinking that Chinese place."

"Mexican."

"Never again. . .pizza?" Skinner's voice was half-hearted.

"Thai."

"I knew you'd say that," Skinner said, eyes narrowing. "You've been through their menu twice over already. Aren't you sick of it yet?"

"Never. I could go for Greek, though."

"Mm. I don't suppose there's any reason we couldn't order both."

"Both what?"

"Greek. Chinese. Whatever."

Impatiently, Alex said, "Jesus. Chinese, then." 

Skinner frowned, said abruptly, "Have you always been so hung up on Thai food?"

"What--no, why--" But Alex was not slow on the uptake; and then, too, it was likely he had come to subliminally recognize that manner of frown, some peculiar tenor in the voice that indicated a particular train of thought. "You think they'd bother to canvass Thai restaurants all over the country, putting the word out to look for the nefarious one- armed man? Well, I guess it would be possible. But even I'm not that paranoid."

"Maybe you should be."

"Doesn't matter--it's a recent addiction." Alex smiled fractionally, almost unaware of his curving lips. Charm was bred in the bones, offhand, steeped in acid. "Worrying again, Walter? Seeing headlines? Bureau VIP and Toyboy Found Slain in Gay Love Nest--"

"When I'm slain I won't be around to worry about something like that."

Alex's eyelids lowered a notch. "Mm. Tough guy." He nudged his head in and carefully nipped at Skinner's lower lip, then opened him up with the wet point of his tongue. Down at hip-level, his cock throbbed in sympathetic greed. They kissed some more, lazily and then roughly, sparring and goading each other. Who would break first? Moving his hand, Alex brought the beer bottle down between their bodies and rubbed it against Skinner's crotch. Skinner deftly plucked away the bottle and put it on the table behind him. 

Hand free at last, Alex took advantage of its placement and began kneading the hard bulge in Skinner's jeans. Immediately, Skinner's mouth grew hotter, more strenuously demanding. The stretch of his body tightened further against Alex, straining muscles rolling like burls of magma under the surface. When had they started kissing like this? Alex couldn't put his finger on just when the shift from simple rutting to elaborate, unfettered pleasuring had taken place. There were times now when the ignition of lust was strong enough to send them tumbling to the ground, desperate, driven to grind their bodies together with an uncivilized lust that would not let them wait. Disturbing and unlikely, it knitted them more closely with the passing weeks, entangling them together with desire if nothing else--except that the more entwined their needs grew, the more difficult it was for them to pull apart afterwards and return to their separate cells of wary solitude. 

"I need to eat," Skinner muttered against Alex's mouth, but then his tongue carved back into the scrim, with plundering force.

"Eat me," Alex offered, after drawing back for his own breath, his voice no more than a thin exhalation.

"Not yet. God." Skinner made a face of bemusement and what looked like pain, then knifed the haze apart and scowled at Alex. "Keep doing that and I'll make you finish it."

"Make me," Alex said now, his eyes shooting diamond- sharp sparks. His voice husked the words out. "What else are you here for, anyway--right?"

Skinner's face adjusted itself slightly toward a cooler unreadability. "I guess that's right." He pulled Alex with him as he moved to the table, and when he sat back down in the chair, Alex submitted to the curved pressing weight of hand under which his neck burned, which drew him floorward to his knees. 

Already, his breath labored and his eyes drifted free of focus. His mouth felt wet with readiness for the particular lust evoked. And he could not decide if he wanted it merely as a kindling foreplay or for its own brute sake. Whatever, whatever, what did it matter. Kneeling, he rubbed his face against the arrowing rise of denim that was bracketed by Skinner's muscled thighs. The other man's hand busied itself unzipping what his jeans cruelly trapped, and in seconds the fly was open and the briefs shoved down, and then the length of him was free, pushing erect with almost pugnacious force, lifting with familiar tropism toward Alex's mouth. The waking monster was already deeply flushed, the swollen head pearled thickly with pre-ejaculate. 

Alex could have teased; sometimes did. But other times, as now, he could bear no prelude to plunging his mouth onto the other man's organ. Could not wait, could not. He shoved his open mouth forward and down, wrapping his hand around the base of the shaft. His head lowered and rose; with sure force he lifted up and worked on the head, sucking its upwelling juice and then letting the padded knob drag across the roof of his mouth toward the back of his throat. Above him, he heard Skinner draw in his breath--not once, but over and over again, a jagged crescendo of lust, pulling like a serrated blade from the throat. Strong hands held his head loosely in place, but never stayed still; carelessly, bluntly, but intimately they explored him, carding Alex's hair, cradling his jaw, rubbing across his ears. 

It was inevitable that the rhythm should escalate; within a few short minutes, Alex felt the other man's balls tighten and hug upward against the pulsing shaft; felt the throbbing prominence of vein stab more wildly beneath the skin. He did a few tricks with teeth and lips he knew would be welcome, then repeated them more gently. Now he was teasing, withdrawing his mouth and playing casually, eloquently with the brimming weight of flesh he held. 

He could not stand to ask outright what he wanted, so instead, when he could take it no more, he simply let go, abruptly cutting short the torment. He sat back, ass to heels, face upturned and waiting. 

Skinner breathed heavily through his nostrils, lips pressed shut. His cock jutted from his jeans, slick, dark, and rudely hard. "You want it now?" he asked, voice abraded into a shadowed half-tone of itself.

"Yeah." Alex licked his lips thoughtlessly and then made a sound like an embryonic laugh that refused full birth. "You taste like soap, Walter. You shower just for me?"

Skinner blinked, not quite pulled from his haze, despite the hooked barb of Alex's voice. "I had to wash the office off," he said.

Alex felt a pleasant flush spill through his body, blood stirred to life by the dark currents within Skinner's voice. Crazy to think they were alike in anything, and yet at times-- at times the resonance told itself this clearly, in the drop of one small phrase, and often they both recognized the moments. They shared the bitterness of having bitten too deeply into the offered apple. There was that, at least. 

Rising, Alex gave Skinner a brief look that conveyed invitation. He stretched his arm behind his head and pulled off his top rather than unzipping it, then entered the bedroom without looking back. The bedroom was clean and showed only sparse signs of habitation--a few books, and the flung clothes of a single man with the luxury of simplicity and no one to chide him for his minor messes. The room faced west and was filled with light. Outside the window the winter sky was lit with strands of fire that should have melted the snow which lined ledges and rooftops and blew erratically off in the wind. But the blazing strata, like an illuminated fire opal, might have been as cold. In a tree across the street the light tangled in the branches and was immeasurably painted on the sky behind. 

Alex moved to a window and stared out; he'd known Skinner was early this evening, but his mental clock had failed him--it could be, now, no more than half past five. He shifted when Skinner appeared next to him. Remaining to one side, out of line of sight from the street, Skinner turned the stick on the blinds, angling their slats to obscure the view. 

"You came earlier than I thought."

Skinner made a slight, almost facetious face, but never susceptible to easy puns he merely said, "I left early. Or on time, depending on who's judging the measure of my work day." 

"Who does?"

With a dry twitch of lips, Skinner squinted abstractedly through the blinds into the piercing sun, and said, "No one, actually. But if I don't do the time, the shit gets hip-deep fast. Anything less than seventy hours and I might as well be a slacker." He paused as if contemplating the wisdom of voicing such remarks, then added after a moment, "Probably wouldn't last six months before they'd ease me out, or I'd walk in one day and find a cushion on my chair."

Alex spoke while pushing out of his sweats. "Cushion? What's that, executive equivalent of finding a pencil taped to your locker?"

"I expect so. . .pencils? That's no bureau tradition." Skinner unbuttoned his shirt. Still heavily erect he looked indecent to Alex's appreciative eyes.

"NYPD," he said absently, speaking with automatic finesse the lines of a scripted self whose lies and truth folded into one another. "When you're no good on the street anymore they let you know. Time to ride a desk, push the pencils. Vroom, vroom." Alex, naked now, touched Skinner's collarbone and the flesh below, tracing small scars that threaded whitely across the surface. It was like touching polished wood, marked by use. "I don't think you're ready for pasture yet, even if you do drive a desk, Walt." His voice, though low and lightly mocking, paid a certain degree of respect; yet it was best his regard should always remain less than earnest. In more brooding moments, Alex was apt to regret warm words as forfeited advantages. Any point yielded might tote up to his later downfall. 

"Mm." Skinner nudged off his jeans, kicked them away. "Desktops make for some of the ugliest battlefields I've seen."

"That's saying a lot, I bet." Alex ran his hand down the other man's chest, scratching lines not unlike the residual scars, fresh red to their white. Nipples hardened and he traced a circle around one, watching it tighten, not missing the action below, where Skinner's resurging arousal made a similar, more potent display of the body's ability to erect its tissues. 

After another moment, they both moved simultaneously, stepping as if into one another, their chests and hips pressing close, angles of their bodies bumping here and there, mouths locking even as their hips rubbed together, lance to lance in a familiar battle. This simulation of intimacy lasted not long before Skinner twisted Alex around and gave him a rough shove onto the bed. The roughness was what Alex had been waiting for, that sudden breath-stealing loss of balance as the storm picked him up and tossed him. In seconds, they were wrapped together on the bed, a braid of flesh whose elements were difficult to distinguish, equally convolute and lost. Now a knot of limbs, now a snarl. They hurt each other, biting without restraint, peppering each other's skin with bruises. Skinner had the advantage, however, and eventually used it, flipping Alex face down in the disarray of sheets and pinning him there while readying himself. When he was sheathed, lubed, he pulled Alex up and let him feel the edge of that blunt force he would be taking in. 

Alex, balanced precariously, shuddered his need; the tightly pocketed entrance to his body blazed with the raw, nerved prescience of a recognized sensation, while in the depths of himself he felt only the dull lack of fulfillment. Just the weight of Skinner's cock resting along his ass made him seethe and twist; getting that much meat inside would split him apart, gut him like a fish sliding to halved pieces on the length of a bowie knife. 

Not getting it would drive him mad. 

He pushed his ass back, and in doing so thought, helpless to the thrall of memory, of Mulder. It sent a savage furl of irony and amusement through his wired being to picture a greedy Fox caught and impaled on the same spear of flesh that was pushing its way into Alex now. Would he throw back his head, would his eyes glaze as he surrendered, would he gasp, fight, howl his gratitude, pass out? 

And then Alex could only think of himself. It was nearly too much, always precisely a hair short of too much; he had never given himself up for fisting, but imagined it would compare poorly to this. He spent his breath in short, helpless gasps, refusing to sing his approval, and then with one final jab the invader was fully embedded, the pressure of balls signalling it could go no further. Skinner's cock. Sometimes, alone, loosely thralled in fantasy, Alex tried to puncture his own swelling lust by thinking of it in derisive terms: Walter Skinner's Mighty Dick. But ridicule could not break the addiction, and size alone was not the full measure of Alex's fascination. 

Groaning, Alex felt himself pulled upright. "Ah--God--yes, you fucker--bastard--oh sweet fucking Jesus *yes*--" Driven out of himself, past articulation, Alex might have been sixteen again, rendered tongue-tied and stupid by the novelty of rut. 

"You like that--"

"Yes--harder--yes--"

"Harder--you like this--"

Hands pulled Alex back into a fitted arch, touched him everywhere, casually and familiarly, grabbing a slippery palmful of his hair and yanking his head back, stroking up and down his abs, sliding behind to grip his ass, to open him up further. He sobbed as rude fingers chafed his nipples, as they pinched and fondled him and rose to his throat to collar him briefly but emphatically. 

"Ah, god--don't--don't stop that--" Alex rotated his ass with a deft screwing maneuver that brought from Skinner a quiet yell--a vocalizing trick that Alex never in his life had heard from anyone else. The piercing bulk inside him pumped harder, pulling Alex back with dragging motions that made him feel insubstantial, as if his ass--his entire body--were a plug of cork stabbed and riding on a fish-hook; all the power and volition of their act was behind him, in the other man's hard curve of cock. 

He was a man without a name, without history, past or future, given over to this--just a fuck, but essential, necessary as food to him. What did words matter, banter and skirmish, if this clash of flesh was possible. It honed something in the soul, kept life lit. To shove back against another man and feel each bone in the body matched, nearly, angle to angle, strike to strike like wielded staffs, to feel a man's cock staking its claim, confirmed one's most basic existence. Alex was *there*. Staked to the dirty ground of the earth, twisting on what tethered him, breathing as keen as fire. And the keening was in his throat as well, rising, primal, desperate; his head shook itself wildly on Skinner's shoulder, he thought of Mulder, his lust stabbed higher and higher, but it was Skinner who was there with him, big and solid as a wall behind him, impossible to push down, safe as houses, dangerous as a grizzly, a near stranger in all things but this, and so not a stranger at all. 

Roughness of their cheeks scratching, a fine, aching hurt, abetted with other sensations toward a killing intensity--a bladed fire that pushed through his ass and carved Alex senseless, carved him relentlessly onto a single point that he could feel high inside him like a knob of diamond--this, and the building strain of countless muscles, a tremelo stress in his architecture, a wild chafe of back to chest, ass to hips, the trembling widespread sprawl of his thighs against a buffer of heavier muscle. He rode and was ridden. It was a simple repetition of tiny, subtle actions, small twists, little grinds of ecstasy--hips, ass, shoulderblades--and then deeper, harder movements, the exquisitely forced, almost painful effort toward a shared achievement, sustained and stretched to that nearly unbearable tension that seeks to break itself.

Alex's head ground itself round and around on Skinner's shoulder, lifted and dropped itself. He parted his lips and breathed a moan of assent when blunt fingers stroked his sensitized nipples, when broad hands flowed down his body like waves of lava toward his pelvis to weld there, to hold him, and then he choked off a half-formed curse, or a yes that could not be spoken, as one hand moved further, to grip his swollen, blazing cock the way a man might grip a fire-heated knife. No fancy favors, the hand just took him and squeezed, but did so over and over, not leaving him, moving faster and gripping harder as it proved it knew exactly what he needed, unyielding even when Alex's own hand closed over its clasp and meshed their fingers together--the feeling was impossible, shaming, too much to bear. It felt like his father's hand, not the twist of incest but the simple interlocked catch of key to lock, breath-taking, beautiful, and completely unacceptable. Alex came with poorly stifled screams that he would have hated if he were able--high-pitched sounds that stripped his throat raw and revealed a pleasure that branded him, that even as his half-closed eyes rolled like wet pearls back in his head, in the ripped timeless ecstasy of climax, defined and betrayed him as. . . .

But no part of his pleasure-stormed mind finished the thought, never did. 

Skinner's own sounds of pleasure broke low and near in Alex's ears, grunts and groans of a man whose inhibitions are momentarily loosened, who perhaps is not aware of how deeply his throat offers up his ecstasy. He cried out "Oh god, oh Christ!" in a hoarsened voice that made Alex's skin sweep with a rippling sheer of brazen fire and sent a final spasm of iced jism through his blurting cock. He beat his skull one last time on the bouldering pillow of muscle behind him and then fell back into his body, gasping for breath, brought to a sudden sharp awareness of his aching, thorn-sharp nipples, his depleted cock, and a body blissed on the perfection of being fucked to pieces by a man who knew how to fuck a man.

Alex slumped forward, melting onto the bed. His ass felt like a swollen bowl of seed, spilling itself--this even though skinner had used a condom. He liked the aftermath, the sense of mess that was its own kind of bliss, a wallowing in base essences. But it wasn't to be lingered over. After this nod to animalism, Alex usually felt compelled to rinse clean--shower or shit, whatever would break the spell of that brief, post- coital contentment. The physical mistake of happiness was not to be treasured; it was weakness, a window of vulnerability. This was as true now as any time, and so when Skinner rolled away and stretched out on the bed, Alex's first thought was to seek the solitude of the bath. 

But as he moved, Skinner snagged his arm and held him, and then wordlessly drew him back. Alex, grudging, dark eyes cooling back to steel, said nothing either for a minute, then grew restless. 

"Don't get warm and cuddly on me, Walter," he said with irritable venom. 

"I don't like it when you race from the bed to wash me off," Skinner said, voice sliding toward a menace Alex hadn't expected. Perhaps thinking of his own earlier remark about washing off the office, Skinner added, "If this is just a job to you, you can resign. I'm not payrolling your services."

Alex's eyes narrowed speculatively. "So what do you care if I want to shower?" he said, turning the question into a hard challenge. Implications and unspoken terms lay between them like spilled petals on the sheets, their scent distracting, thin and bruised. 

Skinner's jaw tensed; the bafflement of their uneasy arrangement written into his face. "Do as you like," he said. His detachment was abrupt, seemingly absolute. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, but seemed less hurt than piqued. Walter Skinner was inviolable, of course. No one could chisel down to a heart through such a thickness of stone as he fronted. 

Alex stared at the other man in the semi-darkness that had come into the room while they fucked. "What exactly am I doing here ?" 

Skinner reached and turned on the light, then looked over at Alex as if he had needed to see something clearly before answering. " You're doing wonders for my peace of mind ."

"Yeah? How's that? " Alex husked dryly, stretching in the covers alongside Skinner, deferring his intent to leave . The rumpled bed draped blue folds of coverlet around their legs like irregular ocean fringes. 

"You know well enough. I don't want you loose."

Alex snorted; a mere crumb of a laugh. His eyes glinted darkly, more truly amused. "Hey, Walt: I *am* loose. If I want to go, I'm going. I don't need the Skinner pension plan."

"When did your options start arriving?"

Mouth twisting briefly, Alex said, "If nothing else, I've got my gun hand."

Skinner's eyes darkened without a blink; even the spilling lamplight could not penetrate their pooled depths. "You want to reconsider that line of work, son. It's not. . .healthy." Something in his voice made clear that ill health, whatever form it might take, was not a distant or abstract possibility but a presence in the very room, near as the dark cat-curl of the silent telephone, sitting less than eighteen inches from Skinner's pillow-rested head.

Alex loathed feeling the collar tighten, the leash pull. It made him surly, but he hid the full extent of his distaste. "You're so sexy when you're ethical," he jibed nastily. "It's such an exotic look for you." 

In the jeer was strange truth; it turned Alex on to see Skinner in full executive regalia, in his sedate Brooks Brothers suit, solid tie and tiebar, polished and unobtrusive leather shoes. Gun on hip, badge over heart: these were the icons of a desire whose purity could not be tarnished or tainted by anything Alex might do. The clean white shirts of justice and government had always held an ineluctable appeal for him, and now recalled him also to better times, when the future seemed to beckon on high, promising rewards for his right actions. He had once believed that to earn the approval of those in power would bring that power within his own grasp, at which time he would be. . .inviolable. As Skinner was, damn him. Unfair--it was so utterly, bitterly unfair. Had he been less unwitting, less easily led--if only he had kept his head, he could have kept his place. 

If a thousand impossible things.

"If ethical purity turns you on," Skinner said uncannily, "you must have ridden from cold shower to shower working with Mulder." 

Alex's breath caught. It was a blade slipped between the ribs, unerringly striking him where he ached the most. In his soul he flinched and bled; his face showed hard indifference. He knew--had known for some time, intuitively--that it would never do to tell Skinner what he and Mulder had once had. That they had slept together, that he had fucked that sweet, pure ass and made Mulder scream with joy and worked his hands around that impure throat until his bright, twisted fox, the Fox of unbearable dark need and fire, was undone to a different, less comfortable pleasure. To tell Skinner that would be to hand the man a weapon he could not help but fire. At himself, at Alex--maybe, worst of all, at Mulder.

Out loud, he said only, "Mulder's a saint." Then, with a fine dry nuance of sneer, "An absolute *angel*, Walter. You should try it on with that foxy ass sometime--I bet he'd go for it. I bet he'd go for a new daddy." It was too much. Alex had gone over the invisible line they kept taut between them, and knew it as soon as he spoke. He did not aggravate the matter by displaying regret.

Skinner stared at Krycek from an angle and proximity that made him feel he had suddenly awakened to look up into the face of an intimate demon. The man who lay propped next to him seemed suddenly more than merely human, more significant. Dark currents, darker waters farther out. Beyond the cruelly bladed words, behind the carved stone face and impenetrable targets of his eyes was an unreachable fathom of otherness, the throne room of a lost soul. 

And--beyond belief--it called to something in him. Skinner hated the attraction, tried with every particle of himself to link evil with evil, to tell himself Krycek was simply enseamed in the pure black fabric of horror, threaded fast with the monstrosities of bloody battlefields, with the dripping entrails left by serial killers, with the venal snakes of corruption--men like the unnameable Morley and others Skinner had known. That was what he wished to believe, that there was a veil of darkness unalleviated by light and that it hung apart from all good things, and that on its perimeter was a grey front of ill weather into which a man could drift--but that if lucky could escape again. This was his imagining, the perception he used to maneuver his own self: he would steer his boat from the storm. He would reach safe harbor, and the skies would be clear. 

But it was not like that; not here and now. The dark spell of weather was in himself, and it was not all dark, but was instead blazed with lightning. In places, luminous. 

Just fucking, just an arrangement, he told himself; with a man who, if justice were served, would be locked away to serve hard time. 

And coming in his body was like coming alive. Locking with him, body to body, was like feeling an opposing equal, a sparring partner, struggle not to master him but to reach him, to grapple his flesh purposefully toward some vaguely sensed understanding. Would it be like this with anyone else (with Mulder)? He couldn't imagine, couldn't compare. He had only this to go on; with no one else had sex and power been so fraught with cryptic meaning--so difficult to slough off once the grappling had ended.

These feelings, like an epiphany, arrived in him in the space of an instant, and slid like a dark spoon of medicine through him. He blinked, studied Krycek, tried to fathom the knotted problem. At the heart of a knot was an emptiness. 

"I've never asked if you killed him," he said, surprised to hear his own words. Krycek's face looked anticipatory, watchful. "Mulder thinks you did."

"I know," Krycek said. He said no more.

Skinner looked away, eyed the bedside clock, then rubbed a hand across his scalp, which tingled with settling fervor. His body was descending--still, now--from the height of pleasure, coming down slowly from the scaled peak. There were things he should not attempt to know, dark spots of shadow not to be poked lest they turn into tigers and bite. 

"I'm hungry. . .hungrier," he said. Krycek, moving a little, gave a tiny sound that suggested agreement.

"Thai," Krycek said then, grinning as suddenly and widely as a jack-knife springs open. "Wasn't that what we decided on?"

Another abrupt End.


End file.
